Today I sat in on a philosophy seminar at uni (one of those beautiful affairs where one professor gets up and argues for a theory and all the others proceed to tear him apart). The topic was a defence of induction. Two quotes from the proceedings.
[Person 1] “One might be tempted to inductively argue from [...]
Buried down in Page 8 of Christensen, W.D. and C.A. Hooker (in press), “Representation and the Meaning of Life”, Presented at Representation in Mind: New Approaches to Mental Representation, 27-29th June 2000 at The University of Sydney, is the phrase ”...notwithstanding an understandable fear of premature articulation…” [emphasis mine].
I am the light. (Jesus)
You can’t locate the light. (Quantum Physicist)
You can’t locate Jesus. (Deconstructionist)
This poem is not mine. Well maybe it is mine in some sense, but I didn’t write it. Well maybe I am about to write it in some sense but I didn’t create it. Well maybe I did create it in some sense, and do, every time I read it. In any case, without Ted [...]
”...the good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate π to nine jillion decimal places”. So says Robert Wright in Did The Universe Just Happen, discussing Edward Fredkin’s theory that every process in the universe can be understood as an information [...]
My grandfather is dying. Drifting through half-consciousness in a hospital bed after a five-hour four-way bypass operation that sees him left with tubes twisting out of his body, surrounded by machines, wires holding his breastbone together, a vein from his leg now bound into his heart. The body is a machine: how can you believe [...]
Last night we (me, he, she, others) saw Paul Dempsey play at Uni with Bluebottle Kiss and Sea Life Park. The news from Bluebottle Kiss land is that they recorded their Rage programming yesterday… now that’s something you can only ever dream about as a kid. Before the show I got a chance to look [...]
In the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, the narrator observes that “a man who wants the truth becomes a scholar; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?” The short answer, no doubt, is that [...]
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.
The first book I read by Calvino was If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and I thought it was brilliant (Amazon have my rant as one of their spotlight reviews for the book). I am equally floored by Invisible Cities. I’m not sure you could call it a novel—there is a [...]
One38.org didn’t always merely host 1000 Ridiculous Tragedies—they used to have lots of vaguely net.art related paraphenalia up there, including some cool chain email manipulations. How can I get my hands on one of these, I hear my crazed audience drooling, rising off your collective seats—craze no more, audience, I have located them for you, [...]
“You are here.” [Text from shopping centre map]
“I am in here.” [David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 1. ]
Titles of Artworks I have Yet to Manufacture
The Possibilities Are Endless
Every Choice Is Wrong
Do Not Make A Mistake
You Are Not Alone
Nobody Knows The Real You
There Is No Future
The Way Is Dark But He Has Left Us Signs
Interesting [...]
Disposable items, possibly disposed. Things that do not refer to other things; things that do. Lists. Collections. Containers designed to hold miscellaneous items. Miscellaneous items themselves. The part of my brain that stores the word miscellaneous. The part of my body used to produce it, written; typed. A paper: Gallie, WB. “Essentially Contested Concepts”, in [...]
Last night the sky around Newcastle was lighting up as if the horizon was the edge of a dark room in which God was watching television. There were no clouds in the sky, and there haven’t been all day, either (so it couldn’t have been the second coming, which starts with a cloud the size [...]
I am driving along a busy road when I see a sign warning of aged people ahead; I become alert, as if driving through a natural reserve, where these strange creatures might suddenly leap onto my vehicle.
Later, as I drive over a small bird left dead on the road, I feel the vibrations echoing through [...]
According to one of a newly resurrected school of religious philosophers, “The probability of the Resurrection comes out to be a whopping 97 percent”. See “So God’s Really in the Details?”, New York Times, 11 May 2002.
My estimate of the probability that he is correct: 0%.
OK, I’m reading an unpublished paper (given to me by Dr Hooker; check those qualifications, kids) by Itay Shani titled “Regulatory Role Semantics: Towards an Interactive Conception of Mental Content”. Because I’m not sleepy yet. And it has provoked these tired thoughts, wandering unchecked out into cyberspace…
1. If complex adaptive systems like humans could only [...]
Michel Houellebecq, Whatever.
An antidote to Survivor. God knows why the translator seemed willing to rename the book for English release (the original French title Extension du domaine de la lutte translates literally to something like Extension of the domain of the battlefield, if I remember rightly—this would have been much more appropriate). The central thesis [...]
Chuck Palahniuk, “Survivor”
This is the first work by Palahniuk I’ve read, unless you count the first few pages of Fight Club, which I read at a party somewhere, sometime, I think. The prose is snappy, cynical and cinematic. In fact, I don’t think you’d find anything in it that couldn’t either be rendered by an [...]
Went and saw the Alchemy exhibition at the Brett Whiteley Studio yesterday; I fall in love with him a little more each time. The guy working there was kind enough to let a group of us in even though it was closed to the public (should’ve checked the website before we visited). The theme was [...]
Driving with friends the other day, we saw a sign outside a house advertising an art exhibition. You can’t just drive past that, so we stopped and went inside. There was a young man seated outside the screen door who responded to our greetings by merely opening it for us, and resuming his seat. Inside, [...]